This Week: Trump Faces Ongoing Criminal Cases as MAGA Supporters Push Anti-Democracy Efforts in Key States
This week, the special prosecutor in two federal criminal cases against former President Donald Trump is “gearing up” for the trials by adding a veteran war crimes prosecutor to his team. In the case alleging that Trump mishandled sensitive government documents and interfered with a federal investigation, Trump’s former assistant “told investigators he had instructed her not to tell them about classified files he kept at Mar-a-Lago.” In the other federal case against Trump for allegedly leading a coup attempt after losing the 2020 presidential election, the former president urged the judge to not impose “gag order proposed by prosecutors.”
In the Fulton County case against Trump for allegedly leading a vast multistate criminal enterprise to overturn the 2020 presidential election in seven states, including Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, a prominent pro-Trump lawyer who played a major “role in spreading conspiracies about the 2020 election was named as a witness by Georgia prosecutors,” according to a court filing. In addition, the judge ordered the identities of jurors to be kept secret to protect them from MAGA extremists.
In Georgia, lawyers for a new commission with the power to remove elected prosecutors from office urged a judge to not “halt the commission’s work.” “More than 80 current and former state and federal prosecutors and U.S. Department of Justice officials” had filed an amicus brief in support of halting the commission, including the prosecutor in the Fulton County case against Trump.
In the New York case alleging that Trump and his business fraudulently overvalued their assets by $800 million and $2.2 billion every year over a decade to obtain “favorable loans and insurance arrangements,” the judge called arguments by Trump “literally crazy,” said Trump “persistently committed fraud by inflating the value of his assets,” and ordered “some of Trump’s business licenses be rescinded,” thereby “making it difficult or impossible” to do business in the state.
Across the country, Trump’s supporters continue their efforts to subvert free and fair elections. In North Carolina, MAGA supporters in the House and Senate passed legislation to let the state legislature step in to overturn election results. Also in North Carolina, a proposed budget from MAGA supporters would eliminate “public access to redistricting records,” which would allow the state legislature to create gerrymandered legislative districts in secret.
In Michigan, a panel of federal judges questioned a group of MAGA poll watchers who claimed they witnessed voting irregularities in the 2020 presidential election. In Arizona, the former elections director of La Paz County who spread pro-Trump “voter fraud conspiracies” announced that he is returning to the job after resigning after five months as elections director of Cochise County.
Trump and his supporters attacked Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro for rolling out an automatic voter registration system in which eligible voters will be registered to vote when they get a new or renewed driver’s license, unless they opt out.
MAGA supporters in the Wisconsin State Assembly proposed impeaching the nonpartisan administrator of the state’s elections commission after election-denying “conspiracy theorists” accused her of “helping to steal” the 2020 presidential election. She has filed a lawsuit to keep her job.
